GNOME is a very popular desktop environment for Linux systems. This environment has many components. Therefore, this desktop environment is considered "heavy". GNOME is perfect for many mainstream users, but not for old hardware or systems with few resources. People that use GNOME may benefit from understanding some of its components.NOTE: GNOME supports the X11 and Wayland display servers. Also, GNOME has been ported to BSD.

D-Bus - This is a system that provides a way for programs to communicate with each other. In other words, this is an Inter-Process Communication (IPC) system. This also allows the desktop environment to communicate with the Linux kernel and daemons.

dconf - dconf is a configuration system that manages the settings of a variety of programs and daemons. dconf replaced GConf.

Evolution (Novell Evolution) - This is suite provides a way for users to manage emails, an address book, notes, calendar, and tasks.

gedit - Plain-text editor

GNOME Boxes - Access remote hosts or virtual operating systems

gnome-disk-utility - This is a graphical drive/partition manager similar to GParted

GNOME Display Manager (GDM) - This is a set of software that makes the "login screen". The components include Chooser (for selecting remote hosts), Greeter (the graphical screen), PAM (for user authentication), and XDMCP (a special form of X11 introduced in X11R4).

GNOME Maps - An open-source GNOME alternative to Google-Maps.

GNOME Shell - This is the interface (the part that is seen). This interface provides a bars, menu/dashboard, workspaces, etc.

GNOME Software - This is a graphical frontend to PackageKit, apt-get, and other similar package utilities. This is equivalent to the "Ubuntu Software Center" on Ubuntu or Google's "Play Store" for Android.

GNOME Web (formerly Epiphany) - The GNOME web-browser

Gnumeric - Spreadsheet program

Polaris - The IRC program used in GNOME

PulseAudio - GNOME uses PulseAudio as the sound server. This means that this daemon processes the sounds rendered by the system. PulseAudio then sends the sound to the proper destination (whether that be a device, program, or driver).

Rhythmbox - Music library and player

The GNOME desktop environment also comes with various utilizes like a calculator, calendar, dictionary, etc.NOTE: When installing GNOME, some of these programs can be uninstalled in favor of a preferred alternative.